Blaming the Robot: When AI Becomes the Perfect Corporate Alibi

Wait, let me redo that properly.

title: “Blaming the Robot: When AI Becomes the Perfect Corporate Alibi” date: 2025-05-28T09:15:00+10:00 draft: false tags: [“work”, “ai”, “australia”, “workplace-culture”, “corporate-accountability”]

I came across a thread on r/auscorp yesterday about a Sydney marketing agency, The Big Smoke Media Group, going into liquidation. Reported debts of $4.15 million against assets of about $31,000. Thirteen staff owed money. The ATO owed close to $1.9 million. The director’s explanation, according to the reporting, was that AI had disrupted the marketing industry and that was largely to blame for the collapse.

I read that line twice. Not because it’s implausible that AI is hurting parts of the marketing industry, it clearly is, but because it’s such a convenient place to point when the numbers don’t add up. Thirty-one grand of assets against four million in debts isn’t a company that got quietly outcompeted by a chatbot. That’s a company that’s been hollowed out over a long period, with the bill left for the taxman and the staff to sort out.

One comment on the thread put it better than I could: paying tax and superannuation isn’t optional, and blaming a large language model for not doing either of those things is a bit rich. Someone else pointed out that if AI really were the cause, you’d expect to see a slow decline over a few years, staff let go gradually, offices downsized, the usual grim but honest signs of a business in trouble. Racking up nearly two million in unpaid ATO debt doesn’t happen because ChatGPT wrote a few briefs for free. It happens because somewhere along the line, someone decided the tax office and the staff’s super could wait, and kept spending as if that decision had no consequences.

This is the bit that gets me, and I say this as someone who genuinely finds AI fascinating, who spends a fair chunk of his working life around automation and infrastructure and has watched this technology go from novelty to load-bearing in a few short years. AI is a real disruptor. It is also, right now, the single most useful excuse a struggling director can reach for. It’s abstract enough that nobody can fully disprove it, it’s fashionable enough that journalists will print it without much pushback, and it conveniently shifts the story away from questions like “where did the money actually go” and “why weren’t staff paid their entitlements.” Genuine tension there: I believe AI is going to keep reshaping industries in ways we haven’t fully reckoned with, and I also believe that right now it’s being used as a smokescreen for garden-variety mismanagement. Both things are true and I don’t think they cancel each other out.

There’s a pattern in these liquidations that anyone who’s spent time in corporate Australia has seen play out before, sometimes up close. A company runs into trouble. The directors keep operating, keep spending, sometimes keep drawing a salary, right up until the point where the ATO and the employees are the only creditors left standing with nothing to show for it. Then it folds, a new entity appears with a suspiciously similar name and the same clients, and the director is technically banned from running a company for a couple of years, a restriction that in practice seems to slow nobody down. Meanwhile the people who did the actual work, who wrote the copy and built the campaigns and turned up every day, are stuck waiting years to see their superannuation, if they ever do.

I don’t have a tidy fix for this. Phoenixing is illegal in name but remarkably durable in practice, and I’m not naive enough to think a strongly worded blog post changes that. But I do think there’s something worth saying plainly: when a company folds owing more in unpaid tax and super than it has in assets, “disruption” is doing an enormous amount of unearned work in that sentence. It’s not a neutral force that swept through and knocked the business over. Somebody made choices along the way, and most of those choices probably had nothing to do with any AI model.

On a lighter note, further down the same subreddit there was a post from someone who’d spent the year doing the bare minimum, quietly expecting to be sacked, and instead got promoted. A few commenters made the same point, only half-joking: sometimes businesses promote the person they can’t be bothered managing rather than deal with the actual problem. It’s the Peter Principle with a corporate HR twist. Different post, same underlying theme really: institutions often reward the appearance of momentum over the substance of it, whether that’s a director blaming AI for a bad balance sheet or a manager kicking a problem upstairs instead of solving it.

None of this is going to stop me being curious about what AI can actually do, or worried about what it’s already doing to entry-level work in industries like marketing, where junior roles that used to be the training ground for a whole career are quietly disappearing into a prompt window. Both of those things can sit there uncomfortably next to each other. What I’d like to see less of is companies getting away with using “the robots did it” as a shield for what looks, from the outside at least, like plain old bad management and worse ethics. The staff who are owed their super didn’t lose their jobs to AI. They lost their jobs to a director who kept the lights on with money that wasn’t theirs to spend.